"Fine, even beautiful," just not for us ...
by Michael R. Burch

This is a true story. The name of the journal has been changed to protect the less-than-innocent.

As the editor of The HyperTexts, I believe I understand the most basic function of poetry editors everywhere, which is to publish the best possible poetry that meets the editor's "guidelines." For example, if a poetry site publishes only haiku, then the poetry must fit the editor's definition of "haiku" while being simultaneously worthy of publication.  I would certainly have no objection to the editor of a haiku journal rejecting my submission of a sonnet: indeed, I would have been foolhardy to submit a sonnet to, let's say, Haiku Heaven. But what about a poetry journal whose guidelines are that it "includes all fronts of poetry with as little bias as possible." I might expect to be published if the editor of this journal--let's call it Biasless Schizophrenic, or BS for short--found my poems "fine, even beautiful." Alas, this is not the case, and I fear it's because some editors still consider poems that employ meter and rhyme to be automatically "not modern" in terms of language. If this was the case, most popular songs and many TV jingles would be automatically archaic. Since Mick Jaggar and Eminem are considered modern practitioners of the language, and hardly antiquarians by any measure, I take exception with the notion that such a strange rule should be applied to poets. Since 99% of my poems are written in grammatically correct modern English, I take issue with what seems to be a knee-jerk reaction against rhymed metrical poetry. Here are some excerpts for the BS rejection missive I received:

"Mike, Thanks for your response to my editorial spewings ... and thanks as well for the additional submissions. Returning now to your work--the larger volume of pieces to review--it comes to me that there is simply a stylistic difference here, with no real argument ... My own taste is toward a more decidedly modern or current speech usage in poems, a poetry that may still be beautiful but perhaps not in the same ways that it has been in previous times. I imagine you might actually do well to submit to more classically leaning journals like Poetry. Perhaps it's my oddball aesthetic philosophy at work here. In any event, I do believe your poems are fine, even beautiful, and no sense splitting hairs over phrases. It's just that these aren't fitting into the evolving collection as I see it, and I am sorry not to be inviting you to include your work in this paticular [sic] issue of BS. I believe at present I'll be guest/contributing editor just this one time for now, so things are always changing ... Anyway, thanks again, and may the Muse be with you!"

I will let the reader judge whether the work I submitted was written in something other than good modern English. Here are two examples. If you would like to express an opinion, please contact me (Mike Burch) at mburch@aocg.com.

See

See how her hair has thinned: it does not seem
like hair at all, but like the airy moult
of emus who outraced the wind and left
soft plumage in their wake. See how her eyes
are gentler now; see how each wrinkle laughs,
and deepens on itself, as though mirth took
some comfort there and burrowed deeply in,
outlasting winter. See how very thin
her features are–that time has made more spare,
so that each bone shows elegant and rare.

For loveliness remains in her grave eyes,
and courage in her still-delighted looks:
each face presented like a picture book’s.
Bemused, she blows us undismayed goodbyes.

Violets

Once, only once,
when the sun caught your hair
in a certain slant of light

and you laughed,
abruptly demure,
fragrant among violets,

suddenly,
I knew:
everything had changed . . .

and as you braided your hair
into long bluish plaits
the shadows empurpled,

the dragonflies’
last darting feints
dissolving mid-air . . .

we watched the sun’s long glide
into evening,
knowing and unknowing . . .

O, how the illusions of love
await us in the commonplace
and rare

and frequent our least remarkable days.

Reader Reaction:

With regard to those two wonderful poems of yours that the BS publisher refused, all I can say is that having them on THT is our gain and his loss. Both poems are exquisite. The first, "See", brought tears to my eyes and an aching to my heart as I remembered my grandmother, my mother, and now myself trying to approach old age with courage and bemusement. The stanza: "suddenly/I knew:/everything had changed" in the other poem, "Violets", is so transcendent, so universal, that, regardless of the fact that my moment had nothing to do with violets and everything to do with football, it made me feel again like that 15-year-old girl whose illusion of love was born on an unremarkable Friday night in 1965. All the best, Catherine Chandler